The History of Computing

Today we’re going to talk through the history of Airbnb. But more importantly, we’re going to look at what brought the hospitality industry to a place so ripe to be disrupted. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, and many other cultures provided for putting travelers up while visiting other cities in one way or another. Then inns begins to rise from roads connecting medieval Europe, complete with stables and supplies to get to your next town. The rise of stagecoaches gave way to a steady flow of mail and a rise in travel over longer distances for business gave way to much larger and fancier hotels in the later 1700s and 1800s. In 1888 Cesare Ritz became the first manager of the Savoy hotel in London, after time at the Hotel Splendide in Paris and other hotels. He would open the Paris Ritz in 1898 and expand with properties in Rome, Frankfurt, Palermo, Madrid, Cairo, Johannesburg, Monte Carlo, and of course London. His hotels were in fact so fancy that he gave us the term ritzy. Ritz is one of the most lasting names but this era was the first boom in the hotel industry, with luxury hotels popping up all over the world. Like the Astor, the Waldorf Astoria, the Plaza, the Taj Mahal, and the list goes on. The rise of the hotel industry was on its way when Conrad Hilton bought the Mobley Hotel in Cisco Texas in 1919. By 1925 he would open the Dallas Hilton and while opening further hotels nearly ruined him in the Great Depression he emerged into the post World War II boom times establishing a juggernaut now boasting 568 hotels. Best Western would start in 1946 and now has 4,200 locations. After World War II we saw the rise of the American middle class and the great American road trip. Chains exploded. Choice Hotels which acts as more of a franchiseier established in 1939 sits with 7,000 locations but that’s spread across Extended Stay, MainStay, Quality Inn, Cambria Hotels, Comfort Inn, and other brands. Holiday Inn was founded 1952 in the growing post-war boom time by Kemmons Wilson and named after the movie by the same name. The chain began with that first hotel in 1952 and within 20 years hit 1,400 Holiday Inns landing Wilson on the cover of Time as “The Nation’s Innkeeper.’ They would end up owning Harrah's Entertainment, Embassy Suites Hotels, Crowne Plaza, Homewood Suites, and Hampton Inn now sitting with 1,173 hotels. The Ramada would start the next year by Marion Isbell and has now grown to 811 locations. Both of them started their companies due to the crappy hotels that were found on the sides of roads, barely a step above those founded in the medieval days. Howard Johnson took a different path, starting with soda shops then restaurants and opening his first hotel in 1954, expanding to 338 at this point, and now owned by Wyndham Hotels, a much later entrant into the hotel business. Wyndham also now owns Ramada. The 1980s led to a third boom in hotels with globalization, much like it was the age of globalization for other brands and industries. The oil boom in the Middle East, the rising European Union, the opening up of Asian markets. And as they grew, they used computers to build software to help and cut costs and enable loyalty programs. It was an explosion of money and profits and as the 80s gave way to the 90s, the Internet gave customers the ability to comparison shop and the rise of various sites that aggregated hotel information, with Expedia, Travelocity, American Express, even Concur rising - sites came and went quickly and made it easy for AccorHotels to research and then buy Raffles, Sofitel, Novotel and for Intercontinental and others to user in the era of acquisitions and mergers. Meanwhile the Internet wasn’t just about booking hotels at chains easily. VRBO began in 1995 when David Clouse wanted to rent his condo in Breckenridge and got sick of classifieds. Seeing the web on the rise, he built a website and offered subscriptions to rent properties for vacations, letting owners and renters deal directly with one another to process payments. Vacation Rentals By Owner, or VRBO would expand through the 90s. And then Paris Hilton happened. Her show The Simple Life in 2003 led to a 5 year career that seemed to fizzle at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 with the release of a critical documentary of her called Paris, Not France. The mergers and acquisitions and globalization and being packed in stale smokey rooms like sardines seemed to have run its course. Boutique hotels were opening, a trend that started in the 90s and by 2008 W Hotels was expanding into Europe, now with 55 properties around the world. And that exemplifies what some of this backlash was against big chains that was starting to brew. In 2004, CEH Holdings bought a few websites to start HomeAway.com and in 2006 raised $160 million in capital to buy VRBO and gain access to their then 65,000 properties. homeaway.com would be acquired by Expedia in 2015 for $3.9 billion, but not before a revolution in the hospitality industry began. That revolution started with 2 industrial design students. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia had come from the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduation Gebbia would move to San Francisco and Chesky would move to Los Angeles. They had worked on projects together in college and Gebbia bugged Chesky about moving to San Francisco to start a company together for a few years. By 2007 Chesky gave in and made the move, becoming one of Gebbia’s two roommates. It was the beginning of the Great Recession. They were having trouble making rent. The summer of 2008 brought the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Industrial Design Conference to San Francisco. They had the idea to take a few air beds from a recent camping trip and rent them out in their apartment. Paris Hilton would never have done that. They reached out to a former roommate of theirs, Nathan Blecharczyk. He’s a Harvard alum and pretty rock solid programmer and signed on to be a co-founder, building them a website in Ruby on Rails. They rented those three airbeds out and called their little business airbedandbreakfast.com. They thought they were on to something. I mean, who wouldn’t want to rent an airbed and crash on someone’s kitchen floor?!?! But reality was about to come calling. Venture capital was drying up due to the deepening recession. They tried to raise funding and failed. And so far their story seems pretty standard. But this is where I start really liking them. They bought a few hundred boxes of cereal and made '"Obama O's" and "Cap'n McCain's" to sell at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 for $40 per box. They sold $30,000 worth, enough to bootstrap the company. They would go to South By South West and visit events, growing slowly in New York and San Francisco. The money would last them long enough to make it into Y Combinator in 2009. Paul Graham and the others at Y Combinator has helped launch 2,000 companies, including Docker, DoorDash, Dropbox, GitLab, Gusto, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, Twitch, and Zapier. They got $20,000 from Y Combinator. They changed the site to airbnb.com and a people started to book more and more stays - and not just with airbeds, but rending their full homes out. They charged 3% of the booking as a fee - a number that hasn’t really changed in all these years. They would get $600,000 in funding from Sequoia Capital in 2009 when they finally got up to 2,500 listings and had 10,000 users. Nothing close to what homeaway.com had, but they would get more funding from Sequoia and added Greylock to the investors and by the close of 2010 they were approaching a million nights booked. From here, the growth got meteoric. They won the app award during a triumphant return to South By South West in 2011 and went international, opening an office in London and expanding bookings to 89 countries. The investments, the advertising, the word of mouth, the media coverage. So much buzz and so much talk about innovation and disruption. The growth was explosive. They would iterate the website and raised another $112 million dollars in venture capital. And by 2012 they hit 10 million nights booked. And that international’s expansion paid off with well over half being outside of the United States. Growth of course led to problems. A few guests trashed their lodgings and Airbnb responded with a million dollar policy to help react to those kinds of things in the future. Some of the worse aspects of humanity can be seen on the web. They also encountered renters trying to discriminate based on race. So they updated their policies and took a zero tolerance approach. More importantly, they responded that they didn’t have to think of such things given the privilege of having a company founded by three white guys. They didn’t react with anger or displacement. They said we need to be better, with every problem that came up. And the growth continued. Doubling every year. They released a new logo and branding in 2014 and by 2016 were valued at $30 billion dollars. They added Trips, which seems to still be trying to catch up to what Groupon started doing for booking excursions years ago. During the rise of AirBNB we saw an actual increase in hotel profits. Customers are often millennials who are traveling more and more, given the way that the friction and some of the cost has been taken out of travel. The average age of a host is 43. And of the hosts I know, I can wager that Airbnb rentals have pumped plenty of cash back into local economies based on people taking better care of their homes, keeping fresh paint, and the added tourism spend when customers are exploring new cities. And not just visiting chains. After all, you stay at Airbnb for the adventure, not to go to shop for the same stuff at Forever 21. Even if you take out the issues with guests trashing places and racism, it still hasn’t all been sunshine and unicorns. AirBNB has been in legal battles with New York and a few other cities for years. Turns out that speculators and investors cause extra strain on an already over-burdened housing market. If you want to see the future of living in any dense population center, just look to New York. As the largest city in the US, it’s also the largest landlord of any public institution with over 400,000 tenants. And rent is rising almost twice as fast as incomes with lower income rents going up faster than those of the wealth. Independent auditors claim that AirBNB is actually accountable for 9.2 percent of that. But 79 percent of hosts use their Airbnb earnings to afford their apartments.And if many of the people that count on AirBNB to make their rent can’t afford their apartments. AirBNB argues their goal is to have “one host, one home” which is to say they don’t want a lot of investors. After all, will most investors want to sit around the kitchen table and talk about the history of the city or cool tidbits about neighborhoods. Probably not. AirBNB was started to offer networking opportunities and a cool place to stay that isn’t quite so… sterile. Almost the opposite of Paris Hilton’s life, at least according to TMZ and MTV shows. San Francisco and a number of other cities have passed ordinances as well, requiring permits to rent homes through AirBNB and maximizing the number of days a home can be rented through the service, often to about two thirds of a year. But remember, AirBNB is just the most visible but not the only game in town. Most category leaders have pre-existing competition, like VRBO and HomeAway. And given the valuation and insane growth of AirBNB, it’s also got a slew of specialized competitors. This isn’t to say that they don’t contribute to the problems with skyrocketing housing costs. They certainly do. As is often the case with true disruptors, Pandora’s Box is open and can’t be closed again. Regulation will help to limit the negative impacts of the disruption but local governments will alienate a generation that grew up with a disruption if they are overly-punitive. And most of the limits in place are easily subverted anyways. For example, if there’s a limit on the number of nights you can rent, just do half on VRBO and the other half on Airbnb. But no matter the problems, AirBNB continues to grow. They react well. Gebbia, now the CEO, has a deep pipeline of advisors he can call on in times of crisis. Whether corporate finance, issues with corporate infighting, crisis management, or whatever the world throws at them, the founders and the team they’ve surrounded themselves with have proven capable of doing almost anything. Today, AirBNB handles over half a million transactions per night. They are strongest with millineals, but get better and better at expanding out of their core market. One adjacency would be corporate bookings through a partnership with Concur and others, something we saw with Uber as well. Another adjacency. They now make more money than the Hilton and Hilton subsidiaries. Having said that, the major hotel chains are all doing better financially today than ever before and continue to thrive maybe despite, or maybe because AirBNB. That might be misleading though, revenue per room is actually decreasing correlative to the rise of AirBNB. And of course that’s amplified at the bottom tier of hotels. Just think of what would have happened had they not noticed that rooms were selling out for a conference in 2007. Would what we now call the “sharing” economy be as much a thing? Probably. Would someone else have seized the opportunity? Probably. But maybe not. And hopefully the future will net a more understanding and better connected society once we’ve all get such intimate perspectives on different neighborhoods and the amazing little ecosystems that humanity has constructed all over the world. That is the true disruption: in an age of global sterility, offering the most human of connections. As someone who loves staying in quirky homes on Airbnb, a very special thanks to Chesky, Gebbia, Blecharczyk, and the many, many amazing people at Airbnb. Thank you for reacting the way you do to problems when they arise. Thank you for caring. Thank you for further democratizing and innovating hospitality and experiences. And most importantly, thank you for that cabin by the lake a few months ago. That was awesome! And thanks to the listeners who tuned in to this episode, of the History of Computing Podcast. Have a great day!

Todays episode is on one of the topics I am probably the most intimate with that we’ll cover: the evolution of the Apple servers and then the rapid pivot towards a much more mobility-focused offering. Early Macs in 1984 shipped with AppleTalk. These could act as a server or workstation. But after a few years, engineers realized that Apple needed a dedicated server platform. Apple has had a server product starting in 1987 that lives on to today. At Ease had some file and print sharing options. But the old AppleShare (later called AppleShare IP server was primarily used to provide network resources to the Mac from 1986 to 2000, with file sharing being the main service offered. There were basically two options. At Ease, which ran on the early Mac operating systems and A/UX, or Apple Unix. This brought paged memory management and could run on the Macintosh II through the Centris Macs. Apple Unix shipped from 1988 to 1995 and had been based on System V. It was a solidly performing TCP/IP machine and introduced the world of POSIX. Apple Unix could emulate Mac apps and once you were under the hood, you could do pretty much anything you might do in another Unix environment. Apple also took a stab at early server hardware in the form of the Apple Network Server, which was announced in 1995 when Apple Unix went away, for the Quadra 950 and a PowerPC server sold from 1996 to 1997, although the name was used all the way until 2003. While these things were much more powerful and came with modern hardware, they didn’t run the Mac OS but ran another Unix type of operating system, AIX, which had begun life at about the same time as Apple Unix and was another System V variant, but had much more work done and given financial issues at Apple and the Taligent relationship between Apple and IBM to build a successor to Mac OS and OS/2, it made sense to work together on the project. Meanwhile, At Ease continued to evolve and Apple eventually shipped a new offering in the form of AppleShare IP, which worked up until 9.2.2. In an era before, as an example, you needed to require SMTP authentication, AppleShare IP was easily used for everything from file sharing services to mail services. An older Quadra made for a great mail server so your company could stop paying an ISP for some weird email address like that AOL address you got in college, and get your own domain in 1999! And if you needed more, you could easily slap some third party software on the hosts, like if you actually wanted SMTP authentication so your server didn’t get used to route this weird thing called spam, you could install Communigator or later Communigate Pro. Keep in mind that many of the engineers from NeXT after Steve Jobs left Apple had remained friends with engineers from Apple. Some still actually work at Apple. Serving services was a central need for NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP systems. The UNIX underpinnings made it possible to compile a number of open source software packages and the first web server was hosted by Tim Berners Lee on a NeXTcube. During the transition over to Apple, AppleShare IP and services from NeXT were made to look and feel similarly and turned into Rhapsody from around 1999 and then Mac OS X Server from around 2000. The first few releases of Mac OS X Server, represented a learning curve for many classic Apple admins, and in fact caused a generational shift in who administered the systems. John Welch wrote books in 2000 and 2002 that helped administrators get up to speed. The Xserve was released in 2002 and the Xserve RAID was released in 2003. It took time, but a community began to form around these products. The Xserve would go from a G3 to a G4. The late Michael Bartosh compiled a seminal work in “Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration” for O’Reilly Media in 2005. I released my first book called The Mac Tiger Server Black Book in 2006. The server was enjoying a huge upswing in use. Schoun Regan and Kevin White wrote a Visual QuickStart for Panther Server. Schoun wrote one for Tiger Server. The platform was growing. People were interested. Small businesses, schools, universities, art departments in bigger companies. The Xserve would go from a G4 to an Intel processor and we would get cluster nodes to offload processing power from more expensive servers. Up until this point, Apple never publicly acknowledged that businesses or enterprises used their device so the rise of the Xserve advertising was the first time we saw that acknowledgement. Apple continued to improve the product with new services up until 2009 with Mac OS X Server 10.6. At this point, Apple included most services necessary for running a standard IT department for small and medium sized business in the product, including web (in the form of Apache), mail, groupware, DHCP, DNS, directory services, file sharing, and even web and wiki services. There were also edge case services such as Podcast Producer for automating video and content workflows, Xsan, a clustered file system, and in 2009 even purchased a company called Artbox, whose product was rebranded as Final Cut Server. Apple now had multiple awesome, stable products. Dozens of books and websites were helping built a community and growing knowledge of the platform. But that was a turning point. Around that same time Apple had been working towards the iPad, released in 2010 (although arguably the Knowledge Navigator was the first iteration, conceptualized in 1987). The skyrocketing sales of the iPhone led to some tough decisions. Apple no longer needed to control the whole ecosystem with their server product and instead began transitioning as many teams as possible to work on higher profit margin areas, reducing focus on areas that took attention away from valuable software developers who were trying to solve problems many other vendors had already solved better. In 2009 the Xserve RAID was discontinued and the Xserve went away the following year. By then, the Xserve RAID was lagging and for the use cases it served, there were other vendors whose sole focus was storage - and who Apple actively helped point customers towards. Namely the Promise array for Xsan. A few things that were happening around the same time. Apple could have bought Sun for less than 10% of their CASH reserves in 2010 but instead allowed Oracle to buy the tech giant. Instead, Apple released the iPad. Solid move. They also released the Mac Mini server, which while it lacked rack and stack options like an ipmi interface to remotely reboot the server and dual power supplies, was actually more powerful. The next few years saw services slowly pealed off the server. Today, the Mac OS X Server product has been migrated to just an app on the App Store. Today, macOS Server is meant to run Profile Manager and be run as a metadata controller for Xsan, Apple’s clustered file system. Products that used to compete with the platform are now embraced by most in the community. For the most part, this is because Apple let Microsoft or Linux-based systems own the market for providing features that are often unique to each enterprise and not about delighting end users. Today building server products that try to do everything for everyone seems like a distant memory for many at Apple. But there is still a keen eye towards making the lives of the humans that use Apple devices better, as has been the case since Steve Jobs mainstreamed the GUI and Apple made the great user experience advocate Larry Tesler their Chief Scientist. How services make a better experience for end users can be seen by the Caching service built into macOS (moved there from macOS Server) and how some products, such as Apple Remote Desktop, are still very much alive and kicking. But the focus on profile management and the desire to open up everything Profile Manager can do to third party developers who serve often niche markets or look more to scalability is certainly front and center. I think this story of the Apple Server offering is really much more about Apple branching into awesome areas that they needed to be at various points in time. Then having a constant focus on iterating to a better, newer offering. Growing with the market. Helping the market get to where they needed them to be. Serving the market and then when the needs of the market can be better served elsewhere, pulling back so other vendors could serve the market. Not looking to grow a billion dollar business unit in servers - but instead looking to provide them just until they didn’t need to. In many ways Apple paved the way for billion dollar businesses to host services. And the SaaS ecosystem is as vibrant for the Apple platform as ever. My perspective on this has changed a lot over the years. As someone who wrote a lot of books about the topic I might have been harsh at times. But that’s one great reason not to be judgmental. You don’t always know the full picture and it’s super-easy to miss big strategies like that when you’re in the middle of it. So thank you to Apple for putting user experience into servers as with everything you do. And thank you listeners for tuning into this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re certainly lucky to have you and hope you join us next time!

Today we’re going to honor Larry Tesler, who died on February 17th, 2020. Larry Tesler is probably best known for early pioneering work on graphical user interfaces. He was the person that made up cut, copy, and paste as a term. Every time you say “just paste that in there,” you’re honoring his memory. I’ve struggled with how to write the episode or episodes about Xerox PARC. It was an amazing crucible of technical innovation. But they didn’t materialize huge commercial success for Xerox. Tesler was one of the dozens of people who contributed to that innovation. He studied with John McCarthy and other great pioneers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 60s. What they called artificial intelligence back then we might call computer science today. Being in the Bay Area in the 60s, Tesler got active in war demonstrations and disappeared off to a commune in Oregon until he got offered a job by Alan Kay. You might remember Kay from earlier episodes as the one behind Smalltalk and the DynaBook. They’d both been at The Mother of All Demos where Doug Englebart showed the mouse, the first hyperlinks, and the graphical user interface and they’d been similarly inspired about the future of computing. So Tesler moves back down in 1970. I can almost hear Three Dog Night’s Mama Told Me Not To Come booming out of the 8track of his car stereo on the drive. Or hear Nixon and Kissinger on the radio talking about why they invaded Cambodia. So he gets to PARC and there’s a hiring freeze at Xerox, who after monster growth was starting to get crushed by bureaucracy, so was in a hiring freeze. Les Earnest from back at Stanford had him write one of the first markup language implementations, which he called Pub. That became the inspiration for Don Knuth’s TeX and Brian Reid’s Scribe and an ancestor of JavaScript and PHP. They find a way to pay him, basically bringing him on as a contractor. He works on Gypsy, the first real word processor. At the time, they’d figured out a way of using keystrokes to switch modes for documents. Think of how in vi or pico, you switch to a mode in order to insert or move, but they were applying metadata to an object, like making text bold or copying text from one part of a document to another. Those modes were terribly cumbersome and due to very simple mistakes, people would delete their documents. So he and Tim Mott started looking at ways to get rid of modes. That’s when they came up with the idea to make a copy and paste function. And to use the term cut, copy, and paste. Thee are now available in all “what you see is what you get” or WYSIWYG interfaces. Oh, he also coined that term while at PARC, although maybe not the acronym. And he became one of the biggest proponents of making software “user-friendly” when he was at PARC. By the way, that’s another term he coined, with relation to computing at least. He also seems to be the first to have used the term browser after building a browser for a friend to more easily write code. He’d go on to work on the Xerox Alto and NoteTaker. That team, which would be led by Adele Goldberg after Bob Taylor and then Alan Kay left PARC got a weird call to show these kids from Apple around. The scientists from PARC didn’t think much of these hobbyists but in 1979 despite Goldberg’s objections, Xerox management let the fox in the chicken coup when they let Steve Jobs and some other early Apple employees get a tour of PARC. Tesler would be one of the people giving Jobs a demo. And it’s no surprise that after watching Xerox not ship the Alto, that Tesler would end up at Apple 6 months later. After Xerox bonuses were distributed of course. At Apple, he’d help finish the Lisa. It cost far less than the Xerox Star, but it wouldn’t be until it went even further down-market to become the Macintosh that all of their hard work at Xerox and then Apple would find real success. Kay would become a fellow at Apple in 1984, as many of the early great pioneers left PARC. Tesler was the one that added object-oriented programming to Pascal, used to create the Lisa Toolkit and then he helped bring those into MacApp as class libraries for developing the Mac GUI. By 1990, Jobs had been out of Apple for 5 years and Tesler became the Vice President of the Newton project at Apple. He’d see Alan Kay’s concept of the digital assistant made into a reality. He would move into the role of Chief Scientist at Apple once the project was complete. There, he made his own mini-PARC but would shut down the group and leave after Apple entered their darkest age in 1997. Tesler had been a strong proponent, acting as the VP of AppleNet and pushing more advanced networking options prior to his departure. He would strike out and build Stagecast, a visual programming language that began life as an object-oriented teaching language called Cocoa. Apple would reuse the name Cocoa when they ported in OpenStep, so not the Cocoa many developers will remember or maybe even still use. Stagecast would run until Larry decided to join the executive team at Amazon. At Amazon, Larry was the VP of Shopping Experience and would start a group on usability, doing market research, usability research, and lots of data mining. He would stay there for 4 years before moving on to Yahoo!, spreading the gospel about user experience and design, managing up to 200 people at a time and embedding designers and researchers into product teams, a practice that’s become pretty common in UX. He would also be a fellow at Yahoo! before taking that role at 23 and me and ending his long and distinguished career as a consultant, helping make the world a better place. He conceptualized the Law of Conservation of Complexity, or Tesler’s Law, in 1984 states that “Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?” But One of my favorite quotes of his “I have been mistakenly identified as “the father of the graphical user interface for the Macintosh”. I was not. However, a paternity test might expose me as one of its many grandparents.” The first time I got to speak with him, he was quick to point out that he didn’t come up with much; he was simply carrying on the work started by Englebart. He was kind and patient with me. When Larry passed, we lost one of the founders of the computing world as we know it today. He lived and breathed user experience and making computers more accessible. That laser focus on augmenting human capabilities by making the inventions easier to use and more functional is probably what he’d want to be known for above all else. He was a good programmer but almost too empathetic not to end up with a focus on the experience of the devices. I’ll include a link to an episode he did on the 99% Invisible episode in the show notes if you want to hear more from him directly ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men ). Everyone except the people who get royalties from White Out loved what he did for computing. He was a visionary and one of the people that ended up putting the counterculture into computing culture. He was a pioneer in User Experience and a great human. Thank you Larry for all you did for us. And thank you, listeners, in advance or in retrospect, for your contributions.

Today we’re going to look at an operating system from the 80s and 90s called OS/2. OS/2 was a bright shining light for a bit. IBM had a task force that wanted to build a personal computer. They’d been watching the hobbyists for some time and felt they could take off the shelf parts and build a PC. So they did.. But they needed an operating system. They reached out to Microsoft in 1980, who’d been successful with the Altair and so seemed a safe choice. By then, IBM had the IBM Entry Systems Division based out of their Boca Raton, Florida offices. The open architecture allowed them to ship fast. And it afforded them the chance to ship a computer with, check this out, options for an operating system. Wild idea, right? The options initially provided were CP/M and PC DOS, which was MS-DOS ported to the IBM open architecture. CP/M sold for $240 and PC DOS sold for $40. PC DOS had come from Microsoft’s acquisition of 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. The PC shipped in 1981, lightning fast for an IBM product. At the time Apple, Atari, Commodore, and were in control of the personal computer market. IBM had dominated the mainframe market for decades and once the personal computer market reached $100 million dollars in sales, it was time to go get some of that. And so the IBM PC would come to be an astounding success and make it not uncommon to see PCs on people’s desks at work or even at home. And being that most people didn’t know a difference, PC DOS would ship on most. By 1985 it was clear that Microsoft had entered and subsequently dominated the PC market. And it was clear that due to the open architecture that other vendors were starting to compete. And after 5 years of working together on PC DOS and 3 versions later, Microsoft and IBM signed a Joint Development Agreement and got to work on the next operating system. One they thought would change everything and set IBM PCs up to dominate the market for decades to come. Over that time, they’d noticed some gaps in DOS. One of the most substantial is that after the projects and files got too big, they became unwieldy. They wanted an object oriented operating system. Another is protected mode. The 286 chips from Intel had protected mode dating back to 1982 and IBM engineers felt they needed to harness that in order to get multi-tasking safely and harness virtual memory to provide better support for all these crazy new windowing things they’d learned with their GUI overlay to DOS called TOPview. So after the Joint Development agreement was signed , IBM let Ed Iacobucci lead the charge on their side and Microsoft had learned a lot from their attempts at a windowing operating system. The two organizations borrowed ideas from all the literature and Unix and of course the Mac. And really built a much better operating system than anything available at the time. Microsoft had been releasing Windows the whole time. Windows 1 came in 1985 and Windows 2 came in 1987, the same year OS/2 1.0 was released. In fact, one of the most dominant PC models to ever ship, the PS/2 computer, would ship that year as well. The initial release didn’t have a GUI. That wouldn’t come until version 1.1 nearly a year later in 1988. SNA shipped to interface with IBM mainframes in that release as well. And TCP/IP and Ethernet would come in version 1.2 in 1989. During this time, Microsoft steadily introduced new options in Windows and claimed both publicly and privately in meetings with IBM that OS/2 was the OS of the future and Windows would some day go away. They would release an extended edition that included a built-in database. Based on protected mode developers didn’t have to call the BIOS any more and could just use provided APIs. You could switch the foreground application using control-escape. In Windows that would become Alt-Tab. 1.2 brought the hpfs file system, bringing longer file names, a journaled file system to protect against data loss during crashes, and extended attributes, similar to how those worked on the Mac. But many of the features would ship in a version of Windows that would be released just a few months before. Like that GUI. Microsoft’s presentation manager came in Windows 2.1 just a few months before OS/2 1.1. Microsoft had an independent sales team. Every manufacturer that bundled Windows meant there were more drivers for Windows so a wider variety of hardware could be used. Microsoft realized that DOS was old and building on top of DOS was going to some day be a big, big problem. They started something similar to what we’d call a fork today of OS/2. And in 1988 they lured Dave Cutler from Digital who had been the architect of the VMS operating system. And that moment began the march towards a new operating system called NT, which borrowed much of the best from VMS, Microsoft Windows, and OS/2 - and had little baggage. Microsoft was supposed to make version 3 of OS/2 but NT OS/2 3.0 would become just Windows NT when Microsoft stopped developing on OS/2. It took 12 years, because um, they had a loooooot of customers after the wild success of first Windows 3 and then Windows 95, but eventually Cutler’s NT would replace all other operating systems in the family with the release of Windows 2000. But by 1990 when Microsoft released Windows 3 they sold millions of copies. Due to great OEM agreements they were on a lot of computers that people bought. The Joint Development Agreement would finally end. IBM had enough of what they assumed meant getting snowed by Microsoft. It took a couple of years for Microsoft to recover. In 1992, the war was on. Microsoft released Windows 3.1 and it was clear that they were moving ideas and people between the OS/2 and Windows teams. I mean, the operating systems actually looked a lot alike. TCP/IP finally shipped in Windows in 1992, 3 years after the companies had co-developed the feature for OS/2. But both would go 32 bit in 1992. OS /2 version 2.0 would also ship, bringing a lot of features. And both took off the blinders thinking about what the future would hold. Microsoft with Windows 95 and NT on parallel development tracks and IBM launched multiple projects to find a replacement operating system. They tried an internal project, Workstation OS, which fizzled. IBM did the unthinkable for Workplace OS. They entered into an alliance with Apple, taking on a number of Apple developers who formed what would be known as the Pink team. The Pinks moved into separate quarters and formed a new company called Taligent with Apple and IBM backing. Taligent planned to bring a new operating system to market in the mid-1990s. They would laser focus on PowerPC chips thus abandoning what was fast becoming the WinTel world. They did show Workspace OS at Comdex one year, but by then Bill Gates was all to swing by the booth knowing he’d won the battle. But they never shipped. By the mid-90s, Taligent would be rolled into IBM and focus on Java projects. Raw research that came out of the project is pretty pervasive today though. Those was an example of a forward looking project, though - and OS/2 continued to be developed with OS/2 Warp (or 3) getting released in 1994. It included IBM Works, which came with a word processor that wasn’t Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet that wasn’t Microsoft Excel, and a database that wasn’t Microsoft Access. Works wouldn’t last past 1996. After all, Microsoft had Charles Simony by then. He’d invented the GUI word processor at Xerox PARC and was light years ahead of the Warp options. And the Office Suite in general was gaining adoption fast. Warp was faster than previous releases, had way more options, and even browser support for early Internet adopters. But by then Windows 95 had taken the market by storm and OS/2 would see a rapidly declining customer base. After spending nearly a billion dollars a year on OS development, IBM would begin downsizing once the battle with Microsoft was lost. Over 1,300 people. And as the number of people dropped, defects with the code grew and the adoption dropped even faster. OS/2 would end in 2001. By then it was clear that IBM had lost the exploding PC market and that Windows was the dominant operating system in use. IBM’s control of the PC had slowly eroded and while they eeked out a little more profit from the PC, they would ultimately sell the division that built and marketed computers to Lenovo in 2005. Lenovo would then enjoy the number one spot in the market for a long time. The blue ocean had resulted in lower margins though, and IBM had taken a different, more services-oriented direction. OS/2 would live on. IBM discontinued support in 2006. It should have probably gone fully open source in 2005. It had already been renamed and rebranded as eComStation first by an IBM Business Partner called Serenity. It would go opensource(ish) and openoffice.org would be included in version two in 2010. Betas of 2.2 have been floating around since 2013 but as with many other open source compilations of projects, it seems to have mostly fizzled out. Ed Iacobucci would go on to found or co-found other companies, including Citrix, which flourishes to this day. So what really happened here. It would be easy, but an over-simplification to say that Microsoft just kinda’ took the operating system. IBM had a vision of an operating system that, similar to the Mac OS, would work with a given set of hardware. Microsoft, being an independent software developer with no hardware, would obviously have a different vision, wanting an operating system that could work with any hardware - you know, the original open architecture that allowed early IBM PCs to flourish. IBM had a big business suit and tie corporate culture. Microsoft did not. IBM employed a lot of computer scientists. Microsoft employed a lot of hackers. IBM had a large bureaucracy, Microsoft could build an operating system like NT mostly based on hiring a single brilliant person and rapidly building an elite team around them. IBM was a matrixed organization. I’ve been told you aren’t an enterprise unless you’re fully matrixed. Microsoft didn’t care about all that. They just wanted the marketshare. When Microsoft abandoned OS/2, IBM could have taken the entire PC market from them. But I think Microsoft knew that the IBM bureaucracy couldn’t react quickly enough at an extremely pivotal time. Things were moving so fast. And some of the first real buying tornados just had to be reacted to at lightning speeds. These days we have literature and those going through such things can bring in advisors or board members to help them. Like the roles Marc Andreeson plays with Airbnb and others. But this was uncharted territory and due to some good, shrewd and maybe sometimes downright bastardly decisions, Microsoft ended up leap-frogging everyone by moving fast, sometimes incurring technical debt that would take years to pay down, and grabbing the market at just the right time. I’ve heard this story oversimplified in one word: subterfuge. But that’s not entirely fair. When he was hired in 1993, Louis Gerstner pivoted IBM from a hardware and software giant into a leaner services organization. One that still thrives today. A lot of PC companies came and went. And the PC business infused IBM with the capital to allow the company to shoot from $29 billion in revenues to $168 billion just 9 years later. From the top down, IBM was ready to leave red oceans and focus on markets with fewer competitors. Microsoft was hiring the talent. Picking up many of the top engineers from the advent of interactive computing. And they learned from the failures of the Xeroxes and Digital Equipments and IBMs of the world and decided to do things a little differently. When I think of a few Microsoft engineers that just wanted to build a better DOS sitting in front of a 60 page refinement of how a feature should look, I think maybe I’d have a hard time trying to play that game as well. I’m all for relentless prioritization. And user testing features and being deliberate about what you build. But when you see a limited window, I’m OK acting as well. That’s the real lesson here. When the day needs seizing, good leaders will find a way to blow up the establishment and release the team to go out and build something special. And so yah, Microsoft took the operating system market once dominated by CP/M and with IBM’s help, established themselves as the dominant player. And then took it from IBM. But maybe they did what they had to do… Just like IBM did what they had to do, which was move on to more fertile hunting grounds for their best in the world sales teams. So tomorrow, think of bureaucracies you’ve created or had created to constrain you. And think of where they are making the world better vs where they are just giving some controlling jackrabbit a feeling of power. And then go change the world. Because that is what you were put on this planet to do. Thank you so much for listening in to this episode of the history of computing podcast. We are so lucky to have you.

In a world of rapidly changing technologies, few have lasted as long is as unaltered a fashion as the mouse. The party line is that the computer mouse was invente d by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 and that it was a one-button wooden device that had two metal wheels. Those used an analog to digital conversion to input a location to a computer. But there’s a lot more to tell. Englebart had read an article in 1945 called “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. He was in the Philippines working as a radio and radar tech. He’d return home,. Get his degree in electrical engineering, then go to Berkeley and get first his masters and then a PhD. Still in electrical engineering. At the time there were a lot of military grants in computing floating around and a Navy grant saw him work on a computer called CALDIC, short for the California Digital Computer. By the time he completed his PhD he was ready to start a computer storage company but ended up at the Stanford Research Institute in 1957. He published a paper in 1962 called Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. That paper would guide the next decade of his life and help shape nearly everything in computing that came after. Keeping with the theme of “As We May Think” Englebart was all about supplementing what humans could do. The world of computer science had been interested in selecting things on a computer graphically for some time. And Englebart would have a number of devices that he wanted to test in order to find the best possible device for humans to augment their capabilities using a computer. He knew he wanted a graphical system and wanted to be deliberate about every aspect in a very academic fashion. And a key aspect was how people that used the system would interact with it. The keyboard was already a mainstay but he wanted people pointing at things on a screen. While Englebart would invent the mouse, pointing devices certainly weren’t new. Pilots had been using the joystick for some time, but an electrical joystick had been developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in 1926, with the concept of unmanned aircraft in mind. The Germans would end up building one in 1944 as well. But it was Alan Kotok who brought the joystick to the computer game in the early 1960s to play spacewar on minicomputers. And Ralph Baer brought it into homes in 1967 for an early video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey. Another input device that had come along was the trackball. Ralph Benjamin of the British Royal Navy’s Scientific Service invented the trackball, or ball tracker for radar plotting on the Comprehensive Display System, or CDS. The computers were analog at the time but they could still use the X-Y coordinates from the trackball, which they patented in 1947. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor had seen the CDS trackball and used that as the primary input for DATAR, a radar-driven battlefield visualization computer. The trackball stayed in radar systems into the 60s, when Orbit Instrument Corporation made the X-Y Ball Tracker and then Telefunken turned it upside down to control the TR 440, making an early mouse type of device. The last of the options Englebart decided against was the light pen. Light guns had shown up in the 1930s when engineers realized that a vacuum tube was light-sensitive. You could shoot a beam of light at a tube and it could react. Robert Everett worked with Jay Forrester to develop the light pen, which would allow people to interact with a CRT using light sensing to cause an interrupt on a computer. This would move to the SAGE computer system from there and eek into the IBM mainframes in the 60s. While the technology used to track the coordinates is not even remotely similar, think of this as conceptually similar to the styluses used with tablets and on Wacom tablets today. Paul Morris Fitts had built a model in 1954, now known as Fitts’s Law, to predict the time that’s required to move things on a screen. He defined the target area as a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. If you listen to enough episodes of this podcast, you’ll hear a few names repeatedly. One of those is Claude Shannon. He brought a lot of the math to computing in the 40s and 50s and helped with the Shannon-Hartley Theorum, which defined information transmission rates over a given medium. So these were the main options at Englebart’s disposal to test when he started ARC. But in looking at them, he had another idea. He’d sketched out the mouse in 1961 while sitting in a conference session about computer graphics. Once he had funding he brought in Bill English to build a prototype I n 1963. The first model used two perpendicular wheels attached to potentiometers that tracked movement. It had one button to select things on a screen. It tracked x,y coordinates as had previous devices. NASA funded a study to really dig in and decide which was the best device. He, Bill English, and an extremely talented team, spent two years researching the question, publishing a report in 1965. They really had the blinders off, too. They looked at the DEC Grafacon, joysticks, light pens and even what amounts to a mouse that was knee operated. Two years of what we’d call UX research or User Research today. Few organizations would dedicate that much time to study something. But the result would be patenting the mouse in 1967, an innovation that would last for over 50 years. I’ve heard Engelbart criticized for taking so long to build the oNline System, or NLS, which he showcased at the Mother of All Demos. But it’s worth thinking of his research as academic in nature. It was government funded. And it changed the world. His paper on Computer-Aided Display Controls was seminal. Vietnam caused a lot of those government funded contracts to dry up. From there, Bill English and a number of others from Stanford Research Institute which ARC was a part of, moved to Xerox PARC. English and Jack Hawley iterated and improved the technology of the mouse, ditching the analog to digital converters and over the next few years we’d see some of the most substantial advancements in computing. By 1981, Xerox had shipped the Alto and the Star. But while Xerox would be profitable with their basic research, they would miss something that a candle-clad hippy wouldn’t. In 1979, Xerox let Steve Jobs make three trips to PARC in exchange for the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock pre-IPO. The mouse by then had evolved to a three button mouse that cost $300. It didn’t roll well and had to be used on pretty specific surfaces. Jobs would call Dean Hovey, a co-founder of IDEO and demand they design one that would work on anything including quote “blue jeans.” Oh, and he wanted it to cost $15. And he wanted it to have just one button, which would be an Apple hallmark for the next 30ish years. Hovey-Kelley would move to optical encoder wheels, freeing the tracking ball to move however it needed to and then use injection molded frames. And thus make the mouse affordable. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine all that user research and academic rigor from Englebarts team and engineering advancements documented at Xerox PARC with world-class industrial design. You see this trend played out over and over with the innovations in computing that are built to last. The mouse would ship with the LISA and then with the 1984 Mac. Logitech had shipped a mouse in 1982 for $300. After leaving Xerox, Jack Howley founded a company to sell a mouse for $400 the same year. Microsoft released a mouse for $200 in 1983. But Apple changed the world when Steve Jobs demanded the mouse ship with all Macs. The IBM PC would ;use a mouse and from there it would become ubiquitous in personal computing. Desktops would ship with a mouse. Laptops would have a funny little button that could be used as a mouse when the actual mouse was unavailable. The mouse would ship with extra buttons that could be mapped to additional workflows or macros. And even servers were then outfitted with switches that allowed using a device that switched the keyboard, video, and mouse between them during the rise of large server farms to run the upcoming dot com revolution. Trays would be put into most racks with a single u, or unit of the rack being used to see what you’re working on; especially after Windows or windowing servers started to ship. As various technologies matured, other innovations came along to input devices. The mouse would go optical in 1980 and ship with early Xerox Star computers but what we think of as an optical mouse wouldn’t really ship until 1999 when Microsoft released the IntelliMouse. Some of that tech came to them via Hewlett-Packard through the HP acquisition of DEC and some of those same Digital Research Institute engineers had been brought in from the original mainstreamer of the mouse, PARC when Bob Taylor started DRI. The LED sensor on the muse stuck around. And thus ended the era of the mouse pad, once a hallmark of many a marketing give-away. Finger tracking devices came along in 1969 but were far too expensive to produce at the time. As capacitive sensitive pads, or trackpads came down in price and the technology matured those began to replace the previous mouse-types of devices. The 1982 Apollo computers were the first to ship with a touchpad but it wasn’t until Synaptics launched the TouchPad in 1992 that they began to become common, showing up in 1995 on Apple laptops and then becoming ubiquitous over the coming years. In fact, the IBM Thinkpad and many others shipped laptops with little red nubs in the keyboard for people that didn’t want to use the TouchPad for awhile as well. Some advancements in the mouse didn’t work out. Apple released the hockey puck shaped mouse in 1998, when they released the iMac. It was USB, which replaced the ADB interface. USB lasted. The shape of the mouse didn’t. Apple would go to the monolithic surface mouse in 2000, go wireless in 2003 and then release the Mighty Mouse in 2005. The Mighty Mouse would have a capacitive touch sensor and since people wanted to hear a click would produce that with a little speaker. This also signified the beginning of bluetooth as a means of connecting a mouse. Laptops began to replace desktops for many, and so the mouse itself isn’t as dominant today. And with mobile and tablet computing, resistive touchscreens rose to replace many uses for the mouse. But even today, when I edit these podcasts, I often switch over to a mouse simply because other means of dragging around timelines simply aren’t as graceful. And using a pen, as Englebart’s research from the 60s indicated, simply gets fatiguing. Whether it’s always obvious, we have an underlying story we’re often trying to tell with each of these episodes. We obviously love unbridled innovation and a relentless drive towards a technologically utopian multiverse. But taking a step back during that process and researching what people want means less work and faster adoption. Doug Englebart was a lot of things but one net-new point we’d like to make is that he was possibly the most innovative in harnessing user research to make sure that his innovations would last for decades to come. Today, we’d love to research every button and heat map and track eyeballs. But remembering, as he did, that our job is to augment human intellect, is best done when we make our advances useful, helps to keep us and the forks that occur in technology from us, from having to backtrack decades of work in order to take the next jump forward. We believe in the reach of your innovations. So next time you’re working on a project. Save yourself time, save your code a little cyclomatic complexity, , and save users frustration from having to relearn a whole new thing. And research what you’re going to do first. Because you never know. Something you engineer might end up being touched by nearly every human on the planet the way the mouse has. Thank you Englebart. And thank you to NASA and Bob Roberts from ARPA for funding such important research. And thank you to Xerox PARC, for carrying the torch. And to Steve Jobs for making the mouse accessible to every day humans. As with many an advance in computing, there are a lot of people that deserve a little bit of the credit. And thank you listeners, for joining us for another episode of the history of computing podcast. We’re so lucky to have you. Now stop consuming content and go change the world.